Tales from the Office on Employee Recognition, Employee Rewards, Life Hacks, Gamification, and Human Resources.

Category Archives: Launch

We added a new feature this week to help professionals promote their business relationships. We now allow users to recognize anyone with a professional email address.

Beyond employee recognition

Sometimes you want to recognize or be recognized by people outside of your immediate email domain. You may work at a university that has different subdomains or work at a regional office of a national company. Both of these situations require the ability recognize people in other domain networks.

Along with being able to recognize any professional, user profiles are public. Much like LinkedIn, workers can now share their recognition profile with anyone to promote their abilities.

We are excited to see the response from our customers. Cross company recognitions is a feature that has been requested a number of times from our users.

We are very excited to announce our partnership with Yammer. Last night we deployed a new version of Recognize that integrates with Yammer. Now both Yammer and Recognize have added value through Recognize’s employee appreciation and Yammer’s workplace social feed. I have envisioned this since I started building Recognize.

Announcing Single Sign On with Yammer

The Recognize staff loves this new feature. We don’t have to enter our email and password anymore to login to Recognize. Just one click and we are in the Recognize Stream page.

Even if you are logged in normally, we let you know where you can take advantage of Yammer

When inviting users or sending a recognition, we have login buttons there for easy access to authenticate with Yammer.

Main events in Recognize are populated in Yammer’s recent activity

An update occurs in the Recent Activity when users are validated through +1, when commenting on a recognition, or when a recognition is sent.

Showing thanks has never been easier with our new autocomplete user list

You can find and recognize anyone in your Yammer account. No need to invite anyone if everyone is already on Yammer. If you want to Recognize someone not on Yammer, simply enter their email alias.

Added contrast to the badge trigger button

The choose a badge button is now darker to be easier to see on all monitors. This will increase Recognize’s usability and improve the experience for all users.

Comment with Yammer on the Recognition Show page

Recognize’s value has jumped with Yammer comments. Users can create a conversation about the best work in your company. Sometimes you just want to say, “You’re welcome.”

When comments are made, they show up in your Yammer feed.

Invite users from Yammer

We show a few users that haven’t signed up for Recognize yet. If you select their name and click “Send,” we will send them an invitation email.

If your company is using Yammer, go to our homepage and sign in. If your company doesn’t use Yammer, then go to their homepage to create a private social network for your business.

Sharing is what makes the internet awesome. When we are recognized for our best work, we intrinsically want to share that experience. The sender of a recognition may also want to showcase their appreciation on Linkedin, Google Plus, Facebook, or Twitter. Now sharing recognitions is possible thanks to a recent update to Recognize.

Public Recognitions

In order to allow sharing of recognitions we have introduced the concept of public recognitions. By clicking the privacy ribbon, an employee can make the recognition public or private. At that point, the URL of that recognition can be viewed by anyone.

This functionality makes way for us to soon allow our customers to recognize people in other companies. Cross company recognition is just part of our master plan for Recognize.

Our goal is to make Recognize as easy as possible to use. Eventually, we will have a Chrome Extension, Dolphin Browser plugin, iPhone app, Android app, and a Windows 8 tile app. We will partner and integrate with Salesforce, Intuit, Yammer, and others to make Recognize a part of your workflow.

Today, we stepped towards our goals by launching in the Chrome Web Store.

Launching in the Chrome Web Store is a great way for us to show the cool features Recognize has to offer. Plus, it allows people to launch Recognize from their Chrome web browser. This makes it easier to use Recognize.

We have a long ways to go with all the things we want to do. Each step we make we get closer to a seamless experience for coworkers to record greatness.

I am very proud to announce our Startup Package, all the primary features a company needs to start recognizing their staff. Anyone can sign up today from our Homepage.

Our signup process delivers a seamless experience on both mobile and desktop.

We put a lot of time and effort into making it as easy as possible for users to sign up. We ask a total of six questions over two sections. First, we ask for a company email, company name, and password. If they are the first user of a company, then we immediately log them into our on-boarding process.

On-boarding is only three sections, we ask for their name, if they want to add a team, and finally if they would like to invite any teammates. It is a great experience on all devices.

Less is more

Other enterprise recognition applications complicate the process by including too many features. Recognize simplifies this by only having users send messages to each other. We don’t tie money to our system, and we don’t hinder users by requiring them to setup goals.

If your company wants to reward your staff with money, then host recognition parties every month. Hand out gift cards to the employees who send and receive the most recognitions. Give money rewards to employees who get to certain point levels in Recognize. We want you to control your money, and use Recognize to help guide employee reward decisions.

But we recommend using the inherit nature of competition to fuel success in your work. Cash rewards lead to employees externalizing their motivation, possibly lowering satisfaction.

Responsive design: Recognize supports Mobile, Tablet, Desktop, and TV

We worked very hard to make Recognize great on all devices. Unlike most web apps, ours doesn’t block you if you try to use Recognize from your phone. You don’t have to download anything! Simply go to recognizeapp.com on your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or tablet, and you’ll see that it performs just as well as the desktop experience.

We didn’t just provide responsive styles, we also optimized your mobile experience. We took advantage of touch technology, making your experience on Recognize half a second faster than most mobile websites.

Team management is baked into the Startup Package

We heard loud and clear from talking to businesses that teams are very important. We made teams an integrated component.

Recognize is the ideal solution to spark Social HR in your workplace

The idea of Social HR is to use tools and solutions to connect your employees. Tools like Yammer and Recognize are both great ways to further engage your employees through technology.